


Pyromania (Frozen in Time)

by Kes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-24 02:17:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/629203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sigyn is biding her time. She is from the underbelly of Asgard, and all its glory and majesty mean nothing to her because it has never given her anything. She is going to burn that tower, even if it takes two attempts and the help of a notorious war criminal to do it. (And all she does is fated, to the bitter end.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pyromania (Frozen in Time)

Sigyn is biding her time.

She has no magic, no gold, no power. Her father died in the last great war when she was a child, and they said he went to Valhalla but all her mother cared about was that he couldn’t earn their living anymore. Her mother went off to bake in the tower, and she brought herself up.

Sigyn is building a movement.

She has friends, but none of them are in high places. Some of them fought with her father and are slowly dying of the wounds they got. Some of them are young and lost and futureless, like her. All of them are angry. Asgard’s king has built its glory on the backs of its people, and now they’re going to stand before they break.

Sigyn is itching to burn that damn tower to the ground.

She knows how to take advantage of the great lords’ contempt, how to fit her people into the tower where they will be thought as dumb and voiceless as statues while politics swirls on around them and they remember. The news of what happens in those fateful two days gets to her almost before it gets to the participants; if you insist on having a screaming match in earshot of your guards, it will get around.

She knows about Heimdall, and hides from him in the anonymity of the everyday. The great and proud draw his eye, so she thinks, and takes care to be quiet and good and inconspicuous, and to whisper her calls to arms in each person’s ear.

(She doesn’t know that he knows about her because she stands frozen in the stream of time, or that he knows that fighting fate is futile. Loki was not fated to rule Asgard, but she was fated to destroy it.)

The only reason they don’t strike while Odin lies still asleep is that the arguments haven’t stopped. Some say that Loki will not hesitate to destroy them, and they should wait for him to crash and burn. Some say that they should place a new king on the throne. Some say they should rule Asgard themselves. Some say the tower should stand. The arguments rage from the moment they hear of the uproar to the funeral feast.

Sigyn leaves the table and gathers her closest friends. While the streets are empty, they climb one of the great watching statues and hack at its feet till it falls; they may be commoners, but they are Asgardians and no metal is a match for them. Then they call to the gathering crowd for fire, and march on the tower.

This is the day they choose for their own, but they will not burn golden across the centuries.

The sight of lightning in the sky evaporates her mob before the fires had truly caught, and she stands on the mound of rubble spitting defiance and alone as the guards come out. If she cannot be a leader then she will be a martyr, and she is glad of her tumbling red-gold hair. She unhooks her thin dress from her trousers and holds her hands out, calls, “Smite me, if you dare!” to the top of the tower where she knows from the grumbling thunder that Thor is watching. Let this be an image for the ages.

Instead of the lightning, the guards take her. Some of them are hers, and that is why she survives, but she hisses, “Traitor,” at them all the same. They look down. Even though she hates them for it, she knows they would only have declared themselves for her if she’d had a chance.

(She never had a chance that night. The events were frozen in time long before she conceived them.)

She stands silent at her trial, meeting Odin’s one eye, daring him to have her killed. Sigyn has never been one to beg for forgiveness, and never one for regret. But Frigga leans over, and their mercy tastes like ashes in her mouth.

It looks like the inside of a glowing cell. She has no magic, no gold, no power. She has no friends in high places. This is no mercy and she knows it, but she soon realises that if there were others she could talk to them.

For too long, there are no others, but when another arrives she knows she has been forgotten. Hers was only a blip in the Allfather’s glory, the bite of a gnat to his rule, and caged here she could never pose a threat. Even when she is joined by the greatest threat the realm has faced, they think her no extra danger.

(If Loki was not fated to rule Asgard, he was fated to burn it.)

He is angry, but he is not as angry as her. He wants to rule, not destroy; she makes some promises she means and others she does not to win him over. There will be time for questions of ideology later; binding oaths are for the great lords. She needs none of it.

They plot in secret; nobody comes here except with food, and then they never see the danger under their nose. She smiles harmlessly and lets them think she’s nothing but a girl left behind at the wrong moment, or a figurehead never meant to lead. The guards who were hers before won’t meet her eyes.

Unlike her, he knows where they are, that they are in the bowels of the tower. Their plan is desperate, but eventually she decides it’s time. No cell but his was designed for a master of magic, and even from there he can just about unhook the lock on her door. She steals out and kills the first guard to come for his keys.

The tower burns from the bottom up and they only just make it out alive, laughing like children. Before they run for the city to rouse the people, they pause to watch it burn and bask in the heat and blaze. She smiles at him. The smile she gets back is real, not his normal murderous rictus, so she grabs him and says, “I can’t kiss the fire.”

For a second he looks confused, then he leans in and she pulls him the rest of the way. She knows he’s a killer and a prince and an oppressor, but freedom is buzzing in her veins and the fire is what she really loves.

(Heimdall weeps at his post.)

Her old network rises for her this time. She meets them in the forum where they are hacking at statues to make fortifications for their own streets, and all the hounds of Niflheim break loose. Their strength is their numbers and the fact that the lightning doesn’t know where to strike, so he comes himself.

Loki meets him in a swirl of green and gold magic, forging armour from nothing, and she leads her people on and past him. There’s no sign of Odin. They sweep up and up, and this time the guards know which way the tide turns even while the wind still dances to Thor’s tune.

No commander ever thought harder, or worked with more incendiary stuff. She managed to deploy her people rather than unleash them, but even that is a struggle. They burn the tax records, but not the grain towers. They desecrate the statues, not the gardens. Everywhere they go they bring fire, and everywhere they go she leads them and urges them ever onwards. They leave the forum to the wrath of the princes.

When the sun rises over Asgard there is no sign of Thor or Odin except a grumbling stormcloud over the mountains, and Loki is lying unconscious on the floor of the forum. Skínngarðr, at any rate, is theirs.

So the arguments begin.

Within the day they proclaim the people to be king, since no-one is prepared to step forward for a throne. Sigyn makes sure that any who considered it know that she opposes them, and they step back. This is her revolution, but she did it for her friends and her neighbours as well as herself. None of them can stand above the others.

They argue then about war, about fortification, about food, about markets, about the other realms. They argue about Loki. Many say he should die before he can recover and try to seize his throne back from them, and she defends him because his fire is still warming her face. They argue about the destruction that should ensue. She itches to burn it all, to burn until there’s nothing left to burn, but this is their little rock in space and with the Bifrost still gone they have to live on it. So she throws in her lot with the faction who say it is over.

(It is never over.)

Sometimes she visits Loki and wonders if he’s ever had a wound without a healing stone. Welcome to our world, she thinks, but she hopes he wakes. So many others have not.

The revolution shines by the light of its fires for too short a time, until a red and silver blur drops down from the sky and gives them a message. If they will accept Odin as king once more, he will listen to their leaders’ counsel and run the realm accordingly. If they will not, they will be destroyed.

While the arguments rage, she whispers to a man who still loves her to stop them concluding in Odin’s favour until she returns. She goes ferreting around the ruins and finds a doorway. Slowly, slowly, she creeps along it, a flaming torch in hand, ready to burn it if she must. But no. The way was once very secret, and soon she realises that this is the vault.

Nothing in it is easily usable, but she brings the glove to the surface and finds chaos.

Loki has woken and has made sure that no-one accepts Thor’s proposal by claiming the throne himself. When he brings up her own promises, she points the glove at him even though she has no idea how to use it and says, “The bondage of oaths is from your world, and you burned that yourself! The revolution has no king but the people.”

“I trusted you,” he tells her. It’s a lie.

“And I had them spare your life when you lay unconscious.” She turned away from him deliberately and held the glove high. “This is one of the artefacts of power Odin locked away for himself! If we can use it, it will protect us.”

Her old lover’s sister takes it from her and she lets it go; she knows her misplaced trust in Loki’s respect for the revolution has robbed her of her golden pedestal. No-one should stand on a pedestal anyway.

(If you set a fire, you may get burned.)

They want to let Odin back into Skínngarðr, and she fights a losing battle. The harder she fights, the closer the topic strays to the question of Sigyn.

This trial is harder than the last one, but she was never one to beg for forgiveness and never one for regret. Someone picks up a stone and throws it. She spits. If friends will be this fickle, I will turn to enemies, she thinks and looks for her old fellow prisoner, but he isn’t there. So she holds her head high and starts walking straight out of the city, making sure that the image of her barely faltering at each blow will haunt them to the end of their days.

When she’s nearly out, she turns back and calls out, “Be slaves if you will!”

She has no magic, no gold, no power, and now she has no friends at all. But there are other places in Asgard, and she sets her face eastwards to a village she was told definitely exists.

“They betrayed you, did they?” says a familiar voice from behind her.

“Yes. Asgard is rotten to the core.”

“There are other worlds we can practice on.”

She smiles. “Do not think that I will easily let you rule alone.”

“Oh, I don’t.” Loki holds out his hand.

Sigyn has never been one for regret, and she still itches with a thousand unlit fires. There are tyrants the galaxy over. One of them is standing in front of her.

She takes his hand and knows that one day she will raise a realm against him, just as one day they will inevitably return here to fight the red and gold of Asgard once more.

(Alone of the revolutionaries, she survives unharmed by Odin’s wrath. That was fate, too.)


End file.
